Pondsville Barns

Every time my family drives from Pittsburgh to Thurmont, we get off Rte. 70 at the Smithsburg-Boonsboro exit and drive east over the northern part of South Moutain and through some of the Catoctins, both of which are part of the Blue Ridge that sticks down from Pennsylvania into Maryland between Hagerstown and Thurmont. We always pass through this valley that my mom calls "My Valley" because it's so pretty -- just rolling hills and fields and old-school looking farms. So the other day we took a trip there to photograph the pretty old barns, and found out that the area is called Pondsville/Myerstown. The above barn is on a property that the owner told us dates to the late 18th century called Hewitt's Meadows.

Here's the backside of Hewitt's Meadows, with the cow barn, in the late afternoon light. Roy, who was shooting on his Dual-Reflex medium-format camera from the 1950s, told me that the following picture, which I took on his Nikon D-80 digital SLR, in fact sucks, because the sky is overexposed. You see, I'm learning, here, people, and that's what's important.



Here's another farm. Didn't get the name of this one, but the owner saw us shooting and accused us of terrorist intentions, at which point we had to explain to him the aesthetics of agricultural photography, which he didn't buy, so we had to leave Matt there as collateral. He's still working off the debt we incurred by trespassing. Whatever you're doing out there, Matt, we support you.


Happy farmer. Let's call him "Earl".



The Red Bridge farm. Right near the Pondsville Road.






Matt. Wishing you luck in your captivity as an indentured servant to the grotesque farmers of Pondsville. We'll try to break you out soon.

Thurmont: Pleasant Living

Perhaps not as much as today as in the recent past, visitors at the presidential retreat come to Thurmont to shop or to attend church. When they do, Thurmont townspeople treat them with a reserve that respects their privacy. Sometimes this has its problems as this story by Wireman tells: A man was late to church. Unknown to him, the President and his party were inside and already seated. As the tardy man pulled into the usual parking place, he was stopped by a Secret Service man who remarked, "You can't park here." - "I've got to park here," the man replied. "I'm late for church. I happen to be the minister."

- Paula M. Strain, The Blue Hills of Maryland: History Along the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain and the Catoctins

Right about now I'm living in Thurmont, Maryland, on the Whelan/McGill family property where my grandmother was born and died, where my great-grandfather Ernest McGill used to ride his horse between three Episcopal churches every Sunday morning, giving a sermon and singing mass at each. Where the food at the Cozy is almost as distasteful as the annual Klan rally on the corner of Main and Water Streets. The site of many a righteous Hopkins party, where Uncle Wake, my father's uncle, in the declining years of his reign here, demanded of my friend Paul, on the first day of their acquaintance, "Why don't you love me any more?" This and many other moments, from Wakey's senility to the hikes at Chimney Rock and the Presidential helicopter landing on the little league field on its way to Camp David in foggy weather, and many other happy, more personal memories color my love of Thurmont, a town that, without its connection to my family, may just be another vinyl-sided suburb of Washington, D.C.

I'm here because, between my 6 months in India and the real world, I have decided to have a little sojourn, do some writing, and take my time applying for jobs. In the meantime, Thurmont is very inspiring. The building in the first picture there is the Lodge, a one-room cabin that's been around since the 1890s, I think, and built by my great grandfather.

Here's what it looks like on the inside:




People keep coming, quite welcome, to visit me. Jake came and spent a whole day practicing Charlie Parker heads on his bass, in the Lodge...



Here's the mossy old plaque that declares the Lodge birthplace of my grandmother, Caroline Faries McGill...



These days, the Lodge is my writing workshop...



I try to write about 700-1,000 good words a day, in addition to the freelance articles I'm writing to keep my bank balance in the black. I'm basing my discipline model on Hemingway's while he was at Key West -- he used to deny himself his first drink of the day until he had written 700 words. Then he'd get smashed at Sloppy Joe's and go fishing then beat up queers in the bar all night. I'll not comment further on my own daily routine, but let your imaginations run wild, by all means. I don't like to say I'm writing a "novel" because it sounds obnoxious, so let's just say I'm working on a "long work of fiction". It's going okay. I hope to have 50,000 words by the end of the summer. You know, something to apply to grad school with.

So what else do we do at Thurmont? Here's the door to the main house, the Snuggery, where my grandma and grandpa lived their retired life-after-Baltimore...



Inside, Matty is working on a long silk-screening project. He works at the desk in my grandfather's old room, which has lots of pictures of my uncle Brent wrestling at Gilman. I'm sure Matty'll put up some photos of what he's working on, maybe on facebook or something...



We garden, like true country gentlemen...



We take art shots of glasses frames left in the algae-stained bird bath, probably left here by one of my friends, signifying the juxtaposition of the decay of an old Maryland family and its glory with the moral decay of 21st century hipster youth.



We play that old-timey music underneath the old maple tree...



I make guacamole,



Then we grill.



We admire the dusky Catoctins in the picture window of Wild Rose Lodge,a 1920's Sears-Roebuck pre-fab house filled with mildly onanist classical scultptures, where Uncle Wake used to live.



And gaze, with a snifter of rye, at the mountains themselves...